A PS on hedges -- is the interest in written text or spoken text or e-text? there will be some methodological differences concerning the analysis for each. Ken Hyland, for example, has some extremely interesting discussions of hedging in written text. There is, as this discussion suggests, more controversy in how to interpret hedges in spoken, transcribed, and electronic text. More recently, several of us have been considering hedges to be part of stance analysis. Boyd Davis
Thanks for this next round of information on hedges! My student has been interviewing people about how they perceive themselves. The context is an audio recorded interview about personal topics. So turn taking is not so relevant (I don't think). The interviewee has the floor. What the student has noticed is that some statements are delivered very directly and easily, while in other cases, the interviewee searches for words, hesitates, etc. Is there rigorous analysis of what such hesitations might mean? Or any pointers on how to interpret repeated words, etc. For example, the interviewee might say, "I, I, I am different online [in various ways]. I think the issue is more one of articulating less thought out commentary. I know there are analyses that suggest hesitations may indicate shading the truth (as the interviewee sees it), etc. I don't remember where I've seen those. Again, thanks so much for the input. Any specific articles that get at these issues would be appreciated. Best wishes, --- Bonnie Bonnie A. Nardi School of Information and Computer Sciences University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA 92697-3425 (949) 824-6534 www.artifex.org/~bonnie/ On Apr 12, 2006, at 5:04 PM, Davis, Boyd wrote:
A PS on hedges -- is the interest in written text or spoken text or e-text? there will be some methodological differences concerning the analysis for each. Ken Hyland, for example, has some extremely interesting discussions of hedging in written text. There is, as this discussion suggests, more controversy in how to interpret hedges in spoken, transcribed, and electronic text. More recently, several of us have been considering hedges to be part of stance analysis. Boyd Davis _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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On Apr 12, 2006, at 8:56 PM, Bonnie Nardi wrote:
My student has been interviewing people about how they perceive themselves. The context is an audio recorded interview about personal topics. So turn taking is not so relevant (I don't think). The interviewee has the floor.
This is absolutely a turn-taking situation. If the interviewee didn't answer at all, we would all consider that bizarre. Why? Because we all appear to abide by rules which hold that when someone uses their turn to ask us a question, we should take a turn to respond. Indeed, the assumption that we abide by these rules is so great that we are never allowed to be seen as not responding--even our silence will be interpreted as a (usually if not always negative) response. Indeed, your student has only noticed these hesitancies as notable because of the turn-taking rules that govern most of our interactions, and specifically the rule prohibiting gaps and overlaps of turns. Were there no turn-taking rule prohibiting gaps in the taking of turns, there would be no possibility for the notion of hesitations, or at least no noticing of them in situations like interviews, conversations, etc. (BTW, the notion of a floor is completely bound up with the notion of a turn. Indeed, it is so much so that, I would argue, most interaction researchers have confused one with the other. Even Carol Edelsky, who tried to separate the concepts, wound up adding to the confusion in some ways.)
What the student has noticed is that some statements are delivered very directly and easily, while in other cases, the interviewee searches for words, hesitates, etc. Is there rigorous nalysis of what such hesitations might mean?
Yes. The paper by Pomerantz cited earlier indicates that, at least in certain interactional contexts, hesitations and non-responses can signal that the (non)responder is reluctant to produce the response because it is dispreferred. (Here's where the paper by Sacks comes in--he notes that we prefer to agree, and make nice in conversations. So, when we can't be, for whatever reason, we mark that through things like hesitations.) (BTW, a lot of doctrinaire CAists would object to how I just put all of this--they'd say I've psychologized the notion of dispreference, and they're against that kind of thing. But I think Sacks paper leads directly to that, and I think he's right.)
Or any pointers on how to interpret repeated words, etc. For example, the interviewee might say, "I, I, I am different online [in various ways].
Again, it depends on the interactional situation, but if you have visual data, you may be able to examine your videotapes with Chuck Goodwin's analysis of such repeats in hand. (Charles Goodwin, 1981, Conversational Organization: Interaction Between Speakers and Hearers. New York: Academic Press.) He found that people often repeat when their interlocutors are not gazing at them. Perhaps your student was looking down at his/her interview sheet or notes while the interviewee began to speak? You'd have to look at the data to show this.
I think the issue is more one of articulating less thought out commentary. I know there are analyses that suggest hesitations may indicate shading the truth (as the interviewee sees it), etc. I don't remember where I've seen those.
There is a deep tendency to psychologize when considering interactional phenomenon. So, there are plenty of researchers who have sought to claim that hesitancies are a sign of cognitive difficulty, whether due to the inabilities of the speaker or the difficulty of the topic or extra cognitive work the speaker is engaging in because they are trying to cook up a lie or some such thing. This requires unnecessary speculation about what is in the black box of our brains. Further, it relies on an assumption about our capacity to interact that conversation analysts have repeatedly shown is extremely suspect--the assumption that our capacity for interaction is fragile and easily overpowered by certain difficulties/challenges. --Christian Nelson
This discussion has been very enlightening for me! I didn't mean to suggest that turn taking is turned off in interviews. I meant to suggest that because the interviewee knows she has the floor for as long as she wants it, the hesitations have some meaning because the speaker is not worried about losing her turn. In a sense the interview situation may permit more hesitations than everyday conversation for that very reason. I'm not against looking for meaning beyond the rules of conversation although it does require a more flexible interpretive analysis. People hesitate for many reasons -- they are lying, they are unsure of what they are saying, they are not sure whether they should reveal something, they are searching for the words that say what they mean, they have never articulated the answer to a question someone (such as an interviewer) asks. The problem is is figuring out which reason applies in a given situation. The articles that have been suggested sound very interesting, and again, thanks very much to all who suggested articles and for the very helpful discussion. Best, -- Bonnie On Apr 12, 2006, at 7:15 PM, Christian Nelson wrote:
On Apr 12, 2006, at 8:56 PM, Bonnie Nardi wrote:
My student has been interviewing people about how they perceive themselves. The context is an audio recorded interview about personal topics. So turn taking is not so relevant (I don't think). The interviewee has the floor.
This is absolutely a turn-taking situation. If the interviewee didn't answer at all, we would all consider that bizarre. Why? Because we all appear to abide by rules which hold that when someone uses their turn to ask us a question, we should take a turn to respond. Indeed, the assumption that we abide by these rules is so great that we are never allowed to be seen as not responding--even our silence will be interpreted as a (usually if not always negative) response. Indeed, your student has only noticed these hesitancies as notable because of the turn-taking rules that govern most of our interactions, and specifically the rule prohibiting gaps and overlaps of turns. Were there no turn-taking rule prohibiting gaps in the taking of turns, there would be no possibility for the notion of hesitations, or at least no noticing of them in situations like interviews, conversations, etc. (BTW, the notion of a floor is completely bound up with the notion of a turn. Indeed, it is so much so that, I would argue, most interaction researchers have confused one with the other. Even Carol Edelsky, who tried to separate the concepts, wound up adding to the confusion in some ways.)
What the student has noticed is that some statements are delivered very directly and easily, while in other cases, the interviewee searches for words, hesitates, etc. Is there rigorous nalysis of what such hesitations might mean?
Yes. The paper by Pomerantz cited earlier indicates that, at least in certain interactional contexts, hesitations and non-responses can signal that the (non)responder is reluctant to produce the response because it is dispreferred. (Here's where the paper by Sacks comes in--he notes that we prefer to agree, and make nice in conversations. So, when we can't be, for whatever reason, we mark that through things like hesitations.) (BTW, a lot of doctrinaire CAists would object to how I just put all of this--they'd say I've psychologized the notion of dispreference, and they're against that kind of thing. But I think Sacks paper leads directly to that, and I think he's right.)
Or any pointers on how to interpret repeated words, etc. For example, the interviewee might say, "I, I, I am different online [in various ways].
Again, it depends on the interactional situation, but if you have visual data, you may be able to examine your videotapes with Chuck Goodwin's analysis of such repeats in hand. (Charles Goodwin, 1981, Conversational Organization: Interaction Between Speakers and Hearers. New York: Academic Press.) He found that people often repeat when their interlocutors are not gazing at them. Perhaps your student was looking down at his/her interview sheet or notes while the interviewee began to speak? You'd have to look at the data to show this.
I think the issue is more one of articulating less thought out commentary. I know there are analyses that suggest hesitations may indicate shading the truth (as the interviewee sees it), etc. I don't remember where I've seen those.
There is a deep tendency to psychologize when considering interactional phenomenon. So, there are plenty of researchers who have sought to claim that hesitancies are a sign of cognitive difficulty, whether due to the inabilities of the speaker or the difficulty of the topic or extra cognitive work the speaker is engaging in because they are trying to cook up a lie or some such thing. This requires unnecessary speculation about what is in the black box of our brains. Further, it relies on an assumption about our capacity to interact that conversation analysts have repeatedly shown is extremely suspect--the assumption that our capacity for interaction is fragile and easily overpowered by certain difficulties/challenges.
--Christian Nelson
_______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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Bonnie A. Nardi School of Information and Computer Sciences University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA 92697-3425 (949) 824-6534 www.artifex.org/~bonnie/
Another cause for the respondent's hesitation might be the perceptions and concerns as to what the interviewer might be thinking about the answers to the question. Hence there are "face" issues at work in interviews on both sides (interviewer and interviewee). See, for example, Goffman's work on face in _Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face behavior_. Best wishes, ~Jenny <snip snip>
People hesitate for many reasons -- they are lying, they are unsure of what they are saying, they are not sure whether they should reveal something, they are searching for the words that say what they mean, they have never articulated the answer to a question someone (such as an interviewer) asks. The problem is is figuring out which reason applies in a given situation.
On Apr 13, 2006, at 2:32 PM, Bonnie Nardi wrote:
I didn't mean to suggest that turn taking is turned off in interviews. I meant to suggest that because the interviewee knows she has the floor for as long as she wants it, the hesitations have some meaning because the speaker is not worried about losing her turn. In a sense the interview situation may permit more hesitations than everyday conversation for that very reason.
Whether interviews are all that different is, of course, an empirical matter. For empirical studies that would shed light on this, at least with regard to structured interviews, one could do no better than look at Hanneke Houtkoop-Steenstra's book "Interaction and the Standardized Survey Interview : The Living Questionnaire" and the papers in "Standardization and Tacit Knowledge: Interaction and Practice in the Survey Interview" which she co-edited with Doug Maynard and others. For other types of interviews, I suspect there's a pertinent paper or two in "Talk at Work." But, to be sure, and to find the latest/most pertinent, I'd recommend sending a query to the languse list, where a lot of conversation and discourse analysts congregate.
People hesitate for many reasons -- they are lying, they are unsure of what they are saying, they are not sure whether they should reveal something, they are searching for the words that say what they mean, they have never articulated the answer to a question someone (such as an interviewer) asks. The problem is is figuring out which reason applies in a given situation.
Again, that's a claim requiring empirical justification. As the deception literature shows, there are lots of things we think we know about the signs of deception that turn out to be myths, and I think that verbal hesitation is one of those mythical symptoms. This comes as no surprise--conversation analysts have regularly discovered that what we commonsensically "know" about interaction is bunk. Cheers, Christian Nelson
People hesitate for many reasons -- they are lying, they are unsure of what they are saying, they are not sure whether they should reveal something, they are searching for the words that say what they mean, they have never articulated the answer to a question someone (such as an interviewer) asks. The problem is is figuring out which reason applies in a given situation.
Again, that's a claim requiring empirical justification. As the deception literature shows, there are lots of things we think we know about the signs of deception that turn out to be myths, and I think that verbal hesitation is one of those mythical symptoms.
There is empirical research showing that response latency and longer pauses are associated with deception (unlike making eye contact). However, as this thread has pointed out, there are many other things with which pauses are associated and I would caution a researcher against assuming any particular one to be the case without additional sources of evidence for the claim. Nancy
This discussion has been very helpful and I appreciate the nuanced points people are making. Best wishes, -- Bonnie On Apr 13, 2006, at 1:20 PM, Nancy Baym wrote:
People hesitate for many reasons -- they are lying, they are unsure of what they are saying, they are not sure whether they should reveal something, they are searching for the words that say what they mean, they have never articulated the answer to a question someone (such as an interviewer) asks. The problem is is figuring out which reason applies in a given situation.
Again, that's a claim requiring empirical justification. As the deception literature shows, there are lots of things we think we know about the signs of deception that turn out to be myths, and I think that verbal hesitation is one of those mythical symptoms.
There is empirical research showing that response latency and longer pauses are associated with deception (unlike making eye contact). However, as this thread has pointed out, there are many other things with which pauses are associated and I would caution a researcher against assuming any particular one to be the case without additional sources of evidence for the claim.
Nancy _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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Bonnie A. Nardi School of Information and Computer Sciences University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA 92697-3425 (949) 824-6534 www.artifex.org/~bonnie/
so I'm going off of internet research to hit some of my db's citations of hesitation below, the first describes hesitation in life, in relation to Latour and Tarde, where Tarde recognizes hesitation as somewhat different than an inferred position that Durkheim might take. The second is philosophy and discusses how hesistation can be an object of belief itself. The third discusses hesitation in theoretical works, as a position of theory. The fourth is very long, but discusses hesitation in relationship to dramatic discourse and what it means to pause and hesitate in drama. The 5th gives an example of how to code discourse and specifically code it for hesitation. The 6th discusses Keith Ansell Pearson's concept of the hesitation of things. and finally, some of the work of Boltanski and Thevenot describes how hesitation affects the outcomes of games. I tried to stick to people that actually conceptualized hesitation. I can't really do hedges very well because that is a popular name. Hedging though brings up all kinds of interesting material in relation to cognition, so that is where i'd look. 1: METAPHORS OF THE SOCIAL VIC SEIDLER 20/03/04 Paper delivered as part of the CSISP 'Embodied Psyches/Life Politics' seminar series, Monday 10th May 2004 2: Why-Questions SYLVAIN BROMBERGER Massachusetts Institute of Technology 3: The Theoretical Hesitation: Benjamin's Sociological Predecessor Fredric Jameson 4: Cultural awareness and language awareness based on dialogic interaction with texts in foreign language learning Written by: Anne-Brit Fenner, Department of Education, University of Bergen, Norway Marina Katnić-Bakaršić, Department of Slavonic Languages and Literatures, University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina Mária Kostelníková Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Education, Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovak Republic Hermine Penz, Department of English, University of Graz, Austria Council of Europe Publishing 5:EXPRESSIVE & EVOCATIVE FUNCTIONS AND OBLIGATIONS CODING MANUAL Jens AllwoodVersion 1.0January, 2000 6:Mind the Gap? A Processual Reconsideration of Organizational Knowledge Martin Wood University of Exeter, UK Bergson jeremy hunsinger jhuns@vt.edu www.cddc.vt.edu wiki.tmttlt.com www.tmttlt.com () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.stswiki.org/ sts wiki http://cfp.learning-inquiry.info/ LI-the journal
Dear all, A colleague of mine is interested in researching Asian-Americans' use of Asian imagery in blogs -- but she wants limited-circulation blogs rather than high-profile/high traffic ones. The question I bring to this group of people who are particularly smart about methodological issues regarding Internet research is this: are there methods/mechanisms/search engines that might help find such specific resources? She has tried using Google (of course), and I have suggested using blogstreet to trace connections that might lead to the kinds of blogs she is interested, as well as searching via technorati (with which I've had fairly limited success in my own blog searching activities). The trick, methodologically, is to find blogs that meet the criteria she is interested in -- in a way that might be considered representative of Asian-American blogs. Any help or resources you can suggest would be very much appreciated, and I thank this community for all the interesting and useful things I've learned from this list in the past. Douglas Eyman Rhetoric and Writing, Michigan State University
I'm curious as to what difficulties you've had with Technorati on this count, since it seems pretty well suited to what you are trying for. It's not representative of all blogs, but it is non-representative in interesting ways. The greatest difficulty, I think, is that there is no guarantee at all that the content of a blog is related to a particular group or ethnic identification. Profiles are available on several platforms, but these rarely have people self-identifying by ethnicity. Of course with any of these, you are tied to keyword choices. Another approach might be to use key-sites rather than key words, if there are a set of websites that are likely to be linked to from the group you are trying to define. That is, linking patters to a small group of sites might form a tacit community of sorts. Finally, you could draw on an explicit, "ready made" self-identifying community of bloggers. I am not aware of one that is specifically inclusive of Asian Americans, as opposed to a subset thereof, or a broader Asian focus (e.g., http://ricebowljournals.com/). All that to say, I don't have a particularly good answer, but would be interested in how you end up tackling the problem. - Alex On 4/13/06, Douglas Eyman <eymand@earthlink.net> wrote:
Dear all,
A colleague of mine is interested in researching Asian-Americans' use of Asian imagery in blogs -- but she wants limited-circulation blogs rather than high-profile/high traffic ones. The question I bring to this group of people who are particularly smart about methodological issues regarding Internet research is this: are there methods/mechanisms/search engines that might help find such specific resources?
She has tried using Google (of course), and I have suggested using blogstreet to trace connections that might lead to the kinds of blogs she is interested, as well as searching via technorati (with which I've had fairly limited success in my own blog searching activities).
The trick, methodologically, is to find blogs that meet the criteria she is interested in -- in a way that might be considered representative of Asian-American blogs.
Any help or resources you can suggest would be very much appreciated, and I thank this community for all the interesting and useful things I've learned from this list in the past.
Douglas Eyman Rhetoric and Writing, Michigan State University _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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-- // // Alexander Halavais // Graduate Director of Informatics // University at Buffalo School of Informatics // http://alex.halavais.net //
Hi, I'm also working on a project that requires a collection of genre-specific blogs, so I've been struggling with this issue for quite a while. So far I'm trying to appropriate some methods from ethnography and cyberethnography to guide me. I still work on the methodology, so I can't say whether it's successful or not. But for example, Marcus article about multi-sited ethnography was particularly insightful to think through these issues (Marcus, George E. "Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography." Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 95-117). There are other articles as well. Please ask your colleague to email me off-list if she is interested in exchanging references and ideas. I'd also be very curious to read what AoIR people think about this issue. Inna Kouper Doctoral student, School of Library and Information Science Indiana University
participants (9)
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Alex Halavais -
Bonnie Nardi -
Christian Nelson -
Davis, Boyd -
Douglas Eyman -
inna -
Jennifer Stromer-Galley -
Jeremy Hunsinger -
Nancy Baym